Senior Statistical Scientist

Our vision is to restore our planet through informed decisions, by empowering everyone to make informed climate decisions through Earth Science AI.

We're seeking an ambitious and solution-oriented Senior Statistical Scientist to join our team at an exciting time for our business. You'll be helping us to push the boundaries of our scientific capabilities, by developing and evaluating statistical Earth Science models with a particular focus on weather and climate, as well as overseeing and coordinating their productionization and monitoring. You’ll be doing this work alongside both members of the Science Team, and engineers, designers, and product managers outside the team, to deliver a cutting-edge and scientifically robust product.

You will join a diverse set of scientists and engineers whose backgrounds range from statistics, through physics and climate science, to remote sensing. You’ll build solid, well-engineered ML modelling pipelines that can ingest large quantities of data but retain their reproducibility and transparency to give confidence in your results. You will read up on the latest scientific literature to inform your modelling approaches, but will also ensure that your approach is pragmatic and aligned with stakeholder requirements. You’ll coordinate with other teams to ensure that your outputs, timelines, and expectations are aligned, as well as educating them on scientific topics and concepts. You will advise other members of the Science Team on the statistical methods they use in their own projects, as well as managing and guiding the overall direction of the work done by Statistical Scientists at Cervest.

The role offers a unique opportunity to join an early-stage, highly mission-driven team where you’ll have the ability to make a significant impact on our company and our users.

We are a pro-diversity company and passionate about bringing together people of all backgrounds to work in a genuinely inclusive environment because we know that a diverse team will help us achieve our mission sooner.

As a Senior Statistical Scientist at Cervest, you will:

• Build and evaluate ML pipelines for Earth Science modelling, such as weather and climate downscaling, extreme events modelling, or physical risk estimation.
• Write clean, easy-to-understand code, and contribute to the team’s software engineering knowledge.
• Communicate complex scientific concepts simply but non-reductively to other teams and clients.
• Collaborate with designers and engineers to ensure that Science Team output is incorporated into the product as smoothly and optimally as possible.
• Read scientific papers to understand the current state-of-the-art for relevant modelling tasks, and attempt to replicate those papers where appropriate.

The interview process for this role will be approximately 4-5 hours in total (which we accommodate as much as possible around your obligations), comprising interviews with 3-4 Cervest representatives across the organisation, and a technical challenge which will be sent out to you to complete in your own time.

Requirements

• Statistical, Machine Learning, or Deep Learning background, with industry experience.
• Solid software engineering skills, particularly relating to data engineering, and experience in productionizing and monitoring ML systems.
• Good scientific communication skills, able to explain technical concepts to a non-technical audience.
• Previous experience in leading or managing Data Science teams.
• Eagerness to educate and advise other scientists (especially statisticians) on both general and project-specific statistical methods.
• Pragmatic approach to problem solving.
• Experience with Python.
• Significant experience working with climate or weather data, preferably in a commercial setting.

Bonus points for...

• Experience with Julia.
• Experience in geospatial statistics, modelling physical systems, extreme value analysis, scalable Bayesian inference.

Benefits

Salary – £60-80K / annum (dependent on experience) or local equivalent

Opportunities to learn, grow and thrive with support from talented and empathetic team mates

We are a remote first company and looking for candidates who would be able to come to our office in London (once travel is sensible) a few times a year using more sustainable transport methods (we’ll help with that) so generally within one time zone of the UK.

Fuller list of benefits on our main career page – we’re an early stage startup and currently reviewing our benefits in light of becoming a remote-first company. We are committed to ensuring that we support our team in developing in line with their aspirations and talents as well as continuing to develop our culture in line with our values.